Daitoku-ji: a day inside the Kyoto Zen monastery where the garden also teaches

Long before dawn, the trainees at Daitoku-ji are already seated in a row, chanting sutras under the master's eye. Then comes the most dreaded part of the day: the meeting alone with him, when he poses a question with no logical answer and waits to see in the disciple's face whether something has shifted.

The documentary is the fourth episode of the series Wonders of Men (2019), directed by Véronique Legendre and Alexis Barbier-Bouvet and produced by the French company ZED, which publishes it dubbed into Spanish on its SLICE Iberia channel.

A closed monastery

Daitoku-ji, the "temple of great virtue", stands in northern Kyoto and belongs to the Rinzai school of Zen. It was founded by the monk Shūhō Myōchō in the early 14th century and today brings together more than 20 smaller temples across more than 23 hectares, each with its own garden. The main temple is closed to visitors. The film shows almost empty meditation halls, sliding walls that frame the landscape and open corridors, which a specialist in Japanese sacred architecture reads as a metaphor for the stages of life.

Koan, satori and the dry garden

In Rinzai Zen, the koan is a paradoxical riddle the master sets to dismantle reasoning and provoke an intuitive understanding. Satori would be a passing awakening, a glimpse of Buddhahood. The dry garden supports this practice: raked sand, stones and moss ask the monk to hear the sound of water where no water runs. For the monk who tends them, the building and the garden are a single thing.

Tea, Shinto and stones that sing

The film visits the tea house of one of the sub-temples, where masters of the way of tea were trained. The syllable dō, way, links tea, the sword, incense and flowers to a single discipline. There is a detour into Shinto at the Ōmiwa shrine, which has no main building because the mountain itself is sacred, and an evening concert by Kyoto-born percussionist Stomu Yamashta on volcanic sanukite stones.

What to keep in mind

The narration presents Zen as "the purest form of Buddhism". That is the school's own view, not a historical judgment: other traditions claim the same for themselves. The film is also more aesthetic portrait than investigation, and explains little of the monastery's history.

It is worth watching for the rare images of a closed place and for the calm with which it conveys Zen's central idea: practice lives in every gesture, including sweeping the garden.